Long’s accomplices Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole received 13 years for the same offence of manslaughter.<\/p>\n
In a victim impact statement she read to the court, Mrs Harper said she had “screamed and cried and broken down in fractured defeat” in the wake of her husband’s death.<\/p>\n
As he sentenced them at the Old Bailey the judge, Mr Justice Edis, described the killers as “young, unintelligent but professional criminals”.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Long, Bowers, and Cole had been previously cleared of murder,\u00a0following a four-week trial that concluded last Friday.<\/a><\/p>\n Jurors had heard PC Harper was dragged for more than a mile along country lanes, after he and a colleague responded to reports of a quad bike theft on 15 August.<\/p>\n The officer became “lassoed” to the back of the killers’ Seat Toledo as he tried to apprehend Cole, who had unhitched the stolen quad bike from the car.<\/p>\n As PC Harper chased Cole, the 28-year-old from Wallingford, “unwittingly” stepped with both feet into the loop of a tow rope which was trailing behind the vehicle.<\/p>\n The judge told the court: “Sometimes death may be caused by an act of gross carelessness, sometimes it is very close to a case of murder in its seriousness. That is so, here.”<\/p>\n He said the defendants’ denials hey did they know they were dragging anything behind the car were “clearly false” and he rejected the idea they had shown remorse.<\/p>\n “You killed a talented and brave young police officer who was going above and beyond his duty in order to provide a public service,” he told the killers.<\/p>\n “You did so because you have deliberately decided to expose any police officer that got in your way to a risk of death.”<\/p>\n In her statement, Mrs Harper said she had had only four weeks to call PC Harper “my husband. Four weeks to be called his wife”.<\/p>\n “My life often feels bleak, hopeless, irreparable… I am without question a mere shadow of the person I once was, broken, distraught, beaten,” she continued.<\/p>\n PC Harper’s mother Deborah Adlam said the “family and I feel broken”<\/p>\n “Can you imagine a loved one dying with such indignity?” she said.<\/p>\n “I have sat in the mortuary of my son’s covered body, too damaged for me to see.”<\/p>\n Aimee Harper, the officer’s sister, said she had “faced hell by attending court” and “heard and seen things that have left me physically sick”.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Jessie](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/B483\/production\/_113611264_harper_custodypics.jpg\")
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‘Faced hell attending court’<\/h2>\n